Numerical precession in variational discretizations of the Kepler problem

Abstract

Kepler's first law states that the orbit of a point mass with negative energy in a classical gravitational potential is an ellipse with one of its foci at the gravitational center. In numerical simulations of this system one often observes a slight precession of the ellipse around the gravitational center. Using the Lagrangian structure of modified equations and a perturbative version of Noether's theorem, we provide leading order estimates of this precession for the implicit MidPoint rule (MP) and the Störmer-Verlet method (SV). Based on those estimates we construct some new numerical integrators that perform significantly better than MP and SV on the Kepler problem.